Marijuana Remains a Top Outlaw Drug Under U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Ruling Today

A nine-year effort to get the government to reclassify marijuana as a drug with at least some legitimate uses ended in a FAIL today after the DEA just said no.

Pro-pot forces, however, say they'll appeal the decision to the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington.

As it stands, cannabis is still a top-level "Schedule 1" federal outlaw drug -- considered more illicit than even cocaine, which has some legit medical uses. Weed advocates were trying to get Washington to realize what we know here in Cali:

That pot has at least some medicinal uses.

But the 9-year-old petition for reclassification by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis, including a recent lawsuit that prompted the DEA to get off its ass on this, was denied by the agency today.

The drug agency states that ...

... marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medical use in the United States, and lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision.

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The pro-pot troops, including Joe Elford, chief counsel of Americans for Safe Access, still have high hopes that the government will overcome is cannaphobia.

Elford:

Although this superficially looks like a defeat for the medical marijuana community. It simply maintains the status quo. More importantly, however, we have foiled the government's strategy of delay and we can now go head-to-head on the merits, that marijuana really does have therapeutic value.

Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.